There’s still a couple of days left in September which is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And once again I am joining the Relay fundraiser for St Jude. Please help me help Relay break their fundraising goals for this amazing cause.

Friends in the area… if you haven’t seen a rugby match yet, this is the 3rd consecutive year the local professional rugby team is hosting the eastern conference final and it’s the perfect time to come and find out what you’re missing. Fast moving, hard hitting and fun on the field. Live music and meet the professional players after the match AND you get to hang out with the best sports fans in all of New England, if not the country!

seatgeek.com/new-engla…

#GoodLuckFreeJacks

Reverse happy hour | Morning Brew:

Knightscope uses the funds to help make the country safer. Their autonomous security robots (ASRs) are already helping law enforcement fight crime.

I’d never heard of Knightscope before, but checking out their website I’m getting serious Robocop vibes…

My American friends will be disappointed to find out this is the equivalent of dollar tree.

Last year, I studiously kept a spreadsheet updated with their weekly MLR predictions from 5 New England FreeJacks fans and 1 Old Glory DC fan as a self proclaimed Jacks Rangers Show super fan. After each match I’d then update the spreadsheet with the wins, recalculate results then myself and TJRS would share them to the FreeJacks fan base.

We ran an experiment in the post season for more fans to participate in these weekly predictions and had quite a few entries without too much promotion.

So for MLR 2024, I’m pleased to announce that we’re going bigger than ever. We now have a website and will be taking predictions from any MLR fan via a Google Form. The form will be refreshed each Monday in the regular season.

Set a reminder and remember to visit https://rangerpicks.micro.blog/ every Monday in the MLR regular season!

MLR, World Rugby, USA Rugby forge historic partnership - Anthem RC:

CHARLOTTE-BASED EXPANSION CLUB WILL BE COMMITTED TO U.S. NATIONAL TEAM DEVELOPMENT AND WILL COMPETE IN 2024 MLR SEASON

Now to update my #RangerPicks spreadsheet…. again!

ICYMI RugbyMorning and JacksRangers broke the news of the return of #RangerPicks for #MLR2024 - bigger and better than ever!

Way to go kid!

Just so I’m clear about my feelings on the Charlotte Hawks rumors. I’m super excited, it is awesome news for MLR, I just wish it’d been sorted earlier for fans who travel and fans who are trying to manage a monster spreadsheet. (Just me? Ok)

Home and away kits for all 11 clubs unveiled for 2024 - Major League Rugby:

Ranger Payne rankings:

1. FreeJacks home
2. FreeJacks away
3. Chicago Hounds home
4. NOLA Gold away
5. Houston Sabercats away
6. Chicago Hounds away (at least there’s the collar)
7. Houston Sabercats home (collar, but black is boring)
8. Miami Sharks home (bold and bright but no collar and looking like refs)
10. All the others

RIP to one of the greats

And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

A pretty bleak picture painted about the state and risk of overdrive/libby. I had no idea it was aquired by KKR 3 years ago 😱

Carrot weather year in review

Still waiting for the schedule but the Competition Format update is going to take a moment to process. We’ve gone from 2 conferences with a 6 team playoff to an aborted attempt at 3 divisions with 8 team playoff to a single league table with 8 out of 11 teams making the playoffs.

Waiting for the 2024 MLR schedule to drop like:

How does this account have more than 0 followers?

If only there were some official news (including a schedule!) from the league but I’m excited to see some optimism from someone!

And I just got whamageddoned

After an amazing night at the Free Jacks kit reveal party, catching up with rugby friends, it is devastating to hear the news this morning that Rugby New York will be joining the Toronto Arrows in folding before the 2024 season. Along with pretty much everyone else, I’m even more worried about LA now.

New sticker, who dis?

After several multi hour phone calls with CVS technical support, often ending up in a more broken scenario than the start of the call, can anyone blame me for procrastinating making another call? Finally got around to it today… and I can now see my prescriptions AND all 3 kids!

Quoting @nixCraft@mastodon.social: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/111502805010199174 #retoot

Not only do I remember it, but I wrote my final high school computer science project with it… although I think we might have moved to Borland Pascal by the end of the school year?

House votes to expel Santos from Congress in historic vote | CNN Politics:

“We’ve not whipped the vote and we wouldn’t,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday morning. “I trust that people will make that decision thoughtfully and in good faith. I personally have real reservations about doing this, I’m concerned about a precedent that may be set for that.”

If I were speaker, I would absolutely be concerned that expelling a member that “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.” would set a precedent. Sorry, wait, I’d be concerned if it didn’t

How Apple can take on Amazon—and win

I can’t help but think that Apple is missing a huge opportunity here, and I wonder if part of the struggle is the split mentality between Apple Books as a reading app and Apple Books as a revenue-generating service. The thing is, improving the former ultimately helps the latter, and not having any way to link into library loans means that lots of people—people who like to read books—will never even open the Apple Books app, much less become customers

Dan Moren makes some great points in this article. Integration with Libby is my #1 request

Filling out my app defaults made me reconsider bookmarking and read later. Going to give micro.blog bookmarking a shot.